It is well known that lubricants are commonly used to minimize wear in operating machines such as transmissions, gearboxes and engines used in aricraft, ships, locomotives, trucks and stationary machines to name a few. However, in spite of lubrication, particles wear from rubbing or bearing surfaces and deposit in the lubricant. It has long been recognized that knowledge about these wear particles in the lubricant can give valuable insight concerning the condition of the surfaces. In an aircraft engine, for example, such knowledge has been used to give early warning of engine failure. In many cases such knowledge has also been found useful in scheduling maintenance and repair. One current method to obtain this knowledge is to periodically sample the lubricant and submit it for laboratory analysis. A Spectrometric Oil Analysis Program called SOAP is used by many machine operators both military and civilian throughout the world. However, this method suffers from the delay between lubricant samplying, analysis, and the report of results to the machine operator. In addition, usually only the lubricant is analyzed and not the filter commonly present in lubricant systems. However, it is the filter, designed to entrap foreign particles, that contains most of the wear particles. This is particularly true of the larger particles produced when an abnormal wear condition is present. Since many of the rubbing or bearing surfaces in machines are made of cast iron or steel, the wear particles from these surfaces are ferrous which are magnetic.